No Swell pump for XRP this year?

Looks like nothing can pump XRP these days.


Ripple’s annual two-day Swell conference began earlier today, on the back of a time-honored hype campaign from the XRP army. Over the last 48 hours, Sanbase recorded more than 2200 new mentions of ‘XRP’ and ‘Ripple’ on crypto social media, landing the coin squarely on top of our Emerging Social Trends list for today:

Mentions of 'XRP' and 'Ripple' on crypto social media in the last 3 months (Source: Sanbase)

Expectations for the conference were understandably high, since Swell served as a major catalyst for Ripple’s price action in the years prior:

Yes, both 2017 and 2018 saw a massive Swell-related rally, followed by a swift post-event dump. Except - it looks like dumping came early this year.


Presumably to help grease the hype train, Ripple announced yesterday that it has now onboarded more than 300 customers to RippleNet, a global network of banks and financial institutions using its DLT.


Not long thereafter, XRP jolted up to a 6-week high $0.315, and it seemed like the Swell pump was right on cue. Unfortunately, the event’s keynote speech hasn’t even started, and Ripple’s native coin was already southbound again, losing over 10% in the next 9 hours and hitting a 2-week low $0.283:

XRP's 1-month price action (Source: Sanbase)

The coin has bounced back slightly since the drop and for now seems to have consolidated in the $0.291 range. Still, looks like the Swell pump is officially canceled.


So what gives? While it seems still early to tell, some believe that the majority of XRP faithfuls may have been leveraged long - anticipating another Swell rally - and had gotten rekt on the downswing:

It’s worth noting that on-chain data for Ripple doesn’t give many signs of increased speculative interest ahead of Swell either. While the amount of daily addresses interacting with XRP has been on a short-term uptick, it’s failed to meet even late-October highs:

XRP's 1-month daily active addresses (Source: Sanbase)

XRP’s on-chain transaction volume also tells a similar story; as it turns out, even the intraday pump gained little traction, with on-chain volume of only about 36.2m near the peak:

XRP's 1-month on-chain transaction volume (Source: Sanbase)

Speaking of Ripple’s on-chain transaction volumes, notice those huge spikes last week? We reported on them previously, when, for a very brief time, XRP accounted for more than 50% of all blockchain transactions, with total transaction volume of 1.3B:

XRP's on-chain trx volume spike on Octover 28th

While it’s still unclear what caused this spike, some have been shouting foul play in the meantime; in his recent video, To The Lifeboats points to clues that the ballooning trx activity could even be down to a whale burning XRP, possibly to create hype ahead of the upcoming Swell conference. And given Ripple’s lackluster on-chain activity since, the theory seems to become more plausible by the hour.


All thIS said, there’s technically still time for the Swell prophecy to three-peat, should XRP somehow muster a monumental jump during tomorrow’s second (and final) day of Ripple’s largest annual conference.


However - at this point - even the XRP army seems to be skeptical:


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